


Fuses Burn

by orphan_account



Series: Better the devil you know [3]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Bad Ending, Dark, Heavy Angst, M/M, Self-Harm, Wrongful Imprisonment, this is the most horrible thing i am so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-22 16:20:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3735520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The silence. The silence was what hurt the most.<br/>How Lalnable had taken it for so long Xephos would never know, because it was agony he couldn't ever escape from.<br/>Sequel to Crows.<br/>(Note to the Yogscast: Please don't read any of my fics on stream.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fuses Burn

**Author's Note:**

> My new time-piece is watching ice melt  
> down the bottom of my glass  
> and I love to watch them fuses burn  
> down towards their future plans  
> \- Theme from Nice Guy, Paul Dempsey
> 
> You can read this without reading Crows but it will make a lot less sense.

For the first few months in Lalnable's cell he'd made every attempt he could to escape. He'd broken the wooden bed frame he'd given Lalnable, scraping at the walls and the glass with the fragments until his hands were filled with shards of wood and he couldn't take the pain of it anymore. They took the broken pieces and left only a standard issue mattress while he slept, and the room only got barer as he tried again with shards of a mirror he could never look into because the face was not his.

Xephos had only a mattress and a pillow to his name after the first week, and soon the pillow went as well.

He'd kept trying to dig out with plastic cutlery he was given with each meager meal, until they stopped giving him cutlery stronger than cardboard. Then he just dug at the walls with his blunt fingernails until his fingers were bleeding so badly he passed out. 

By the time he woke up they'd fixed the shallow groove in the wall  and his hands were stuck in black gloves so he could barely move his fingers. 

The more he tried to escape, tried to find a way out, the more they took away from him.

He was given crayons instead of pencils after he tried to break the glass, no longer given paper or blueprints after he ripped every single one of them up, leaving a growing carpet of blue and white fragments.

By the end of a month he got food once a day after he threatened to strangle Lalnable as he walked past, spitting on the floor of his cell with as much anger as he could manage.

By the end of two months he was fully restrained and unable to move after he kept insisting he was Xephos, and nutrients were injected intravenously through a tube. 

By the end of three months he wished he was dead.

* * *

The silence. The silence was what hurt the most.

How Lalnable had taken it for so long Xephos would never know, because it was agony he couldn't ever escape from. There was no sense of time, just an endless stretch that could not be measured, could not be made into hours and minutes.

The only noises he could hear were his breathing and his heartbeat, but they did not stay the tinnitus that constantly rung in his ears, disrupting his already fragmented thoughts.

Xephos could not even hum to break it, the gag around his mouth and nose preventing him from even breathing enough to make a sound more than the faint whistle of his weak breath.

Whenever he saw Lalnable go past, he wouldn't even look, because that only made his vision grow hazy as his breath came too fast with panic and he came to the edge of passing out.

He couldn't handle seeing his own face, his own body, piloted by someone else who pretended to be him so well. He couldn't.

That anxiety only faded into desperate longing just to see his own face again, not the grown-out blonde hair beginning to cover his eyes or the skin as pale as snow that he could see whenever he looked at the steel cuffs around his hands.

"Hello, Lalnable."

The words broke the silence like snapping a twig would, and the words were so familiar it hurt Xephos' head. He hadn't moved his mouth to say them, but it was his voice, through and through.

Lalnable had picked up Xephos' voice like it was his, every little twinge of his self, and Xephos stared up at him with eyes beginning to grow wet.

"Do you want to be able to move again? You've been behaving."

Xephos only blinked up at him, and Lalnable pressed a palm to the glass, a smile feigning friendliness on his lips.

"Just nod."

Xephos tried to nod but he couldn't, not with the way his neck was restrained. He tried, he tried again, but the edge of the metal only dug into the raw scar Lalnable had left in his neck and he cried out, the noise muffled and weak.

Lalnable knew that he couldn't move his head, Xephos realised, and he had just given himself away.

Lalnable shrugged, his smile growing wider, "Your choice. I'll come back later."

As Lalnable slid his palm from the glass and left Xephos began to shake, a sob halfway formed in his throat before he swallowed it down into oblivion.

He wasn't that far gone. The gag and the restraints and the tubes in his veins would not make him weak enough to break. He would find a way out of them himself.

He _had_ to.

* * *

Revenge was sustaining. It gave Xephos a spark to keep his flame of hope going, even when his muscles screamed for movement as they faded like wisps of smoke.

For some time, he thought about other things. His first days on Minecraftia. Honeydew's smile. The real Lalna.

He would dream of better things, when he could sleep. His caffeine withdrawals were crippling, cutting through his consciousness with painful, unfulfillable need.

His thoughts let him escape his tremoring hands for a time, but every time his thoughts strayed, sooner or later, they would circle back to revenge. In the end, nothing else mattered. 

Not anymore.

 

* * *

 

He missed everything. Everything there had been in his life, before he lost them all in one fell swoop.

Deadlines and needles and looks of disappointment were better than this. Pain was better than this.

Anything was better than nothing. Endless, endless nothing. White walls and atrophied limbs and the faint ringing in his ears.

Sometimes Lalnable would come and offer him movement, real food, _hope_ , and that broke the silence for a few moments until it faded, unanswered.

Xephos couldn't try to answer again. He couldn't sink to rock bottom.

He couldn't let his one vestige of himself fade away just because he wanted to pretend Lalnable would give him freedom.

So he waited, waited, and the visits grew so few and far between that his tinnitus only grew worse until he could barely sleep with the constant ring of it.

Silence. Dead silence.

When he had first been locked in here he at least had his own footsteps and the loud sounds of his own breath, but now he only had the quietest whisper of air from his lungs and a sound that was not real.

Pressing his skin into the edges of his metal restraints gave him a burst of sensation, but it was an empty feeling that no longer brought him anything but a faint whisper of what being outside would be like.

"You're doing this to yourself, Xephos."

The use of his name made him choke on a breath, and he glanced up at Lalnable with wide eyes that had no tears left in them.

"I survived that cage better. You did worse to me, as I recall. Something to do with drugging me until I was too brainless to keep trying to escape?" Lalnable said it so nonchalantly as if something like that didn't _matter_ , "Be thankful I don't believe in an eye for an eye."

Xephos made a quiet noise behind his gag, something desperate that didn't resemble a word, and Lalnable tilted his head, continuing conversationally.

"I expected you to give up by now, actually. You've been in there like that for almost a year."

The time was undoubtedly meant to shock him, but time didn't mean anything. It was a luxury he didn't have, and that was all it was. All he did was stare, and a clock would never make that more bearable. 

"Would you like a walk around Yoglabs? You used to take me on those in the early days."

It was a _trap_ , and Xephos conveyed a negative to that as best he could. Lalnable just looked at him with something resembling _pity_.

"Give up, Xephos. I'm sure your escape plan is magnificent, but you and I both know it's not going to work."

It would. He would escape. He would.

He knew he would. He would rather _die_ than just live like this forever.

"Even if you did get out of those restraints, I doubt your legs would carry you more than a metre. And if you did escape them, I would catch you and paralyze your legs. I promise."

Xephos gave a faint scowl and Lalnable's expression of mild empathy dropped away.

"You're in there forever, Xephos. _Forever_. You can't fool me like I fooled you, and you can't get out through the walls. The walls are titanium and steel, beyond the concrete, and the glass is triply reinforced with obsidian."

Xephos felt that like a blow, sharp into his gut, as the last frayed shard of his resolve cracked and shattered like so much glass.

He had only made the walls concrete. Lalnable had never tried to escape after the first few attempts, so there was no need.

Lalnable had known he would try.

He was trapped. Trapped like a rat, and there was no way out.

There would _never_ be a way out.

"Would you like to come out for a while, or would you prefer I left again?"

The sound Xephos made could only be described as _desperate_ , and Lalnable's smile returned to his stolen face.

"Good."

Lalnable leaned over and typed something into a panel, swiped his key card, and the heavy noise of old machinery moving echoed for a few seconds around Xephos' head.

His restraints opened with a clang, his gag removing itself, and Xephos collapsed backwards, the feeling of having _weight_ rushing back to him.

Lalnable was close, moving closer, the door having opened and closed so quickly he didn't notice it.

"Stand up." 

He tried to stand but his arms failed, the stiffness in his bones barely allowing him to move his joints, and he reached out to Lalnable with one tremoring arm that he could barely keep off the ground.

Lalnable eyed it with distaste, shaking his head, "Surely you've figured out I hate being touched by now."

" _Please,_ " Xephos whispered, his voice as quiet and dry as a breath, and Lalnable exhaled a laugh, stepping back.

"Try _again_." 

He did, he _did_ , but he couldn't get his muscles to cooperate when they ached to go back to the same cramped position they had grown used to.

Hope drained from him quickly as he realised he was going to be left here, if he didn't move, but he _couldn't_. He was atrophied to the point where his bones ached inside him at so much as the twitch of a finger, and it was a worse pain than the metal ever was.

Eventually Lalnable cursed under his breath and roughly pulled him to his feet, the motion of just standing driving Xephos to mind-numbing _pain_.

He leaned on Lalnable, held roughly upright, and tried to keep himself from screaming. A bone deep ache filled him as he shakily found his feet, his vision wavering to fuzzy static and then back again.

"Only this once, Xephos," Lalnable said, his voice filled with disgust, but Xephos couldn't bring himself to care.

There was a strange warmth to contact; he'd tried to simulate it for himself, but it was nothing. Nothing like this. He shook and nearly slipped, Lalnable catching him with rough hands and a noise of frustration under his breath.

They began to walk, one shaky step at a time, past the threshold of the door and into the sparse freedom of Yoglabs, the sudden influx of new noises banishing the ring in Xephos' ears.

"Thank you," Xephos made himself say, soft as a whisper, and the smile Lalnable gave him was a crocodile's.

**Author's Note:**

> this is getting another part so that's why it's very short ^^


End file.
